Bruce Holsinger - CULPABILITY

[00:00] Cindy: Welcome to Thoughts from a Page, a member of the Evergreen Podcasts Network. I'm Cindy Burnett, and I am so glad you're here. I personally select and read every book featured on the show so I can bring you thoughtful spoiler-free author interviews.

[00:24] Whether you're deciding what to read next or looking for deeper insight after finishing a book, you're in the right place. I hope these conversations will enrich your reading life. In addition to the podcast, I write a monthly column, Buzz Reads, featuring my top five picks for each month which is linked in the Show Notes.

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[01:05] I am so grateful.

[01:07] Today, Bruce Holsinger joins me to chat about Culpability.

[01:10] I can say without a doubt that this will be one of my top reads of the year. It is incredibly thought provoking and timely. It is on my summer reading guide.

[01:18] It is a Buzz Reads pick and I will be telling everyone I know to read it. Bruce is the author of four novels, including The Displacements and The Gifted School, as well as many works of nonfiction.

[01:29] He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Colorado Book Award, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times,

[01:35] Vanity Fair and many other publications. He teaches at the University of Virginia. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

[01:43] Welcome, Bruce. How are you today?

[01:45] Bruce: I'm wonderful. Thanks so much for having me.

[01:47] Cindy: I'm so glad you're here. I absolutely loved Culpability and after I read it I passed it to my husband and he loved it as well. He's been raving about it ever since.

[01:56] Bruce: Oh, that's great to hear. Thank you.

[01:58] Cindy: Yeah, such a clever and very timely read and you had such a wonderful starred Kirkus review. I just loved everything they said about it.

[02:05] Bruce: Oh, thank you. I was really thrilled. They mentioned some of the other books that I'd written and talked about how I see the relationship between contemporary issues and suspense and yeah, it was great to get that.

[02:20] Cindy: It really was. I hope Spiegel and Grau is going to use that in their marketing.

[02:23] Bruce: They already are.

[02:25] Cindy: Okay good. Because I was like, okay, this is literally perfectly tailored for you.

[02:30] So as we begin, why don't you give me a quick synopsis of Culpability for those that haven't read it yet.

[02:35] Bruce: Yeah. So Culpability, it's a kind of dark family drama set in 

[02:40] The present, set right now, about more issues of moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence.

[02:47] And the premise is kind of the aftermath of this accident that this family of five gets in. They're in a minivan, it's on auto drive. So kind of the AI system is driving the van,

[03:03] and their son Charlie is at the wheel and not driving, but at the wheel. The dad is sitting next to him, and the mom and the kids are in the back seats.

[03:16] And everyone in the family ends up feeling culpable in some way, hence the title. Feeling responsible for what happens in the accident which kills two people in an oncoming car.

[03:30] And there's a few twists. One of the things you learn fairly quickly is that Lorelei, the mother in the family, is a world leader in the field of ethical artificial intelligence.

[03:42] She works in computation at a really high level, but she's also an ethical philosopher. And as we go along, we read excerpts from her work on artificial intelligence in the form of an excerpt from a book I imagined that she had written called Silicone Souls on the culpability of artificial minds.

[04:04] And they go down to a house on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

[04:09] There's a tech billionaire who's a neighbor who gets involved for reasons that we learn as we go along. And the novel ends up

[04:18] not making an argument, but asking us to think about those sorts of issues of responsibility,

[04:24] of culpability, of loss of agency in this really fast moving age of AI.

[04:29] Cindy: I cannot wait to talk about so many things that you just mentioned. But the first thing that I am dying to ask you is your pub date. Originally it was in October and it got pushed up to July.

[04:40] And I find this fascinating because as I watch as books come out and things are happening frequently, pub dates are pushed back. But I'm not sure I've ever seen one pushed up, especially by several months.

[04:51] Can you tell me anything about that?

[04:53] Bruce: Well, I can't tell you the exact reason,

[04:56] which will all become clear on the week of publication.

[05:00] All I'm allowed to say is the pub date was changed in order to take advantage of

[05:07] What was it? What. What did she ask me to say? An exciting marketing opportunity.

[05:11] Cindy: Okay. I figured it was an exciting opportunity. So I was like, okay,

[05:15] Well, that's awesome. And by the time this airs, I'm sure we will all know what that is, and I cannot wait to hear. I will have my ears peeled listening for that.

[05:24] But that's very exciting. Congratulations.

[05:26] Bruce: Thanks so much. Thank you.

[05:28] Cindy: So tell me about coming up with the ideas for this one. All I kept thinking as I was reading this book is how smart you are.

[05:36] It was just like, so above my ability at times, especially Lorelei's manual. I thought, wow, this just took a lot of, I'm sure, research and thought and just getting it all down onto the page in a way that was really interesting and didn't bog the reader down.

[05:52] Bruce: Well, It's funny. This novel actually began with the setting.

[05:57] And so many of my novels begin with a premise or a character or a conceit or some kind of narrative arc that I want to explore. But this novel,

[06:07] the seeds of it, which had nothing to do with AI, came early in the pandemic, when I think it was that first September, October of the pandemic. And we were living at home with our sons and we all wanted to get out of the house.

[06:21] And so we just got an Airbnb, a pretty modest house over in the Northern Neck of Virginia,

[06:27] one of those big rivers right off the bay. And we were in this cove. And I went and kayaked out that first day and passed at the end of the cove at the point,

[06:39] this,

[06:40] what looked like a really out of place,

[06:42] for lack of a better word, estate or compound,

[06:45] exactly as described in the novel. It was, just the trees had been raised, 

[06:52] there were tennis courts, there was this massive renovated house, there was this fake looking lighthouse thing and this white sandy beach. And if you've been over there, I know you live in Richmond.

[07:02] If you've been over there to the Northern Neck, you know, that kind of thing, it's usually, it's much more rustic over there. And this was just so bizarrely out of place.

[07:11] And as I was coming back from my kayak, a helicopter landed on a helipad right near the point. And again, it was so garish, so out of place. And I watched from a distance as, you know, a couple people got out of it and I had no idea who they were.

[07:25] And that just kind of stuck with me for some reason. Just the juxtaposition of these kind of ramshackle houses in the cove that we were staying in and this massive compound that had clearly recently been renovated.

[07:37] And so that just kind of stayed in my head. I was working on another project, another novel.

[07:44] And then, as often happens, different layers started coming in. I just started thinking, you know, who was that? What family is here versus what family is there, and how do they relate to each other?

[07:55] And it wasn't really until a couple years later that I started thinking about artificial intelligence and started thinking about Silicon Valley and tech billionaires and so on. And then that's when I started developing, layering things on top of each other on that setting.

[08:11] Like, I just want this to be where the heart of the novel is. It's not where it begins.

[08:16] It begins on a highway on the way to Delaware. But this.

[08:20] This is where I want a lot of the action to take place, because it felt it was beautiful and enchanting on the one hand. It was also kind of suffocating, and there were these weird juxtapositions there.

[08:29] So that's really how I came up with it, the setting. And that's not usually where I begin.

[08:32] Cindy: That is really interesting because as you're describing, what you saw, all of that shows up in your book. And I would have not thought that that's where you started.

[08:40] Bruce: Hmm. Yeah. My novels often surprise me more than anyone else because I'm not an outliner. I very much make it up as I go along.

[08:48] I have a sense of where I want things to go,

[08:51] but I'll often be improvising up until the last minute, until the last revision.

[08:56] Cindy: Oh, that's so interesting, because that's one of the things I wanted to ask you, because it's a multimedia format. You have the narrative, but you also have some chats and you have the book we talked about.

[09:06] There are a variety of different ways that the story is told.

[09:09] So if you're not outlining and you're just writing as you go, how do you do all of that?

[09:13] Bruce: Well, in this case,

[09:15] how do I do it?

[09:17] My last few novels, in fact, all my other published novels, are from multiple points of view,

[09:24] where we actually are in the heads of multiple characters.

[09:27] This is the first time I've written one all the way through in first person,

[09:32] really, from one person's point of view. And I.

[09:36] knew that that was going to happen all the way from the beginning, or at least I knew it was only going to be in Noah's point of view.

[09:42] He's the dad and the family, he's a lawyer. But as I was developing the story, I wanted other perspectives to come in, but not other points of view, if that makes sense.

[09:51] Like, I wanted us to see Alice as she was getting to know her friend Blair through chats. And as we discover very early on through, Blair is actually a chat bot.

[10:04] And so Alice is making this new AI friend. And I wanted to see perspectives on Lorelei and her,

[10:11] life as a philosopher and as a kind of computational genius.

[10:16] And I struggled with how to do that. And I came up with this idea of just little fragments from her book in progress that she's writing that when we learn why she's writing it later in the book.

[10:27] And then there's a couple other places. Like there's a fake New Yorker interview with Daniel Monet, who's the tech billionaire next door,

[10:34] a powerful leader in the field of AI. And we get a New Yorker interview with him and he talks about, you know, some of the things that have led him to where he is, including a tragedy in his family.

[10:47] So that's it. I call, you know, in my last couple novels, The Displacements and The Gifted School, I also use this technique, bringing in interviews, newspaper articles, things like that.

[10:57] I think of them as. The word is paratextual. They're not part of the main plot or they're not sequential with the plot, but they come in from the side in different ways.

[11:06] So I like to write that way and give readers different things to chew on as they move through the narrative.

[11:12] Cindy: And it's a great way to impart information.

[11:14] Bruce: Yes, exactly. Yeah, information without having to iInformation dump on the page.

[11:18] Cindy: Exactly. Or as you said, add in multiple perspectives. So it gives you the way to get stuff out there, but still achieves your goal of the one perspective.

[11:27] Bruce: Yes, exactly.

[11:29] Cindy: So this is the first novel that I have read that is set firmly in the world of AI. I'm sure you're hearing that a lot. Not just the self-driving car, but the smart home, Lorelei's job, the tech mogul, and more that I don't want to spoil.

[11:41] Did this require a lot of research for you?

[11:44] Bruce: You know, 

[11:46] I want to say yes, but not as much as I would have thought. You know, in my day job I'm an academic, I teach medieval literature and literary history at the University of Virginia.

[11:56] And so when I do research for projects that I'm working on as a professor, as a researcher, research will take months or years.

[12:06] When I'm writing novels,

[12:08] sometimes I describe it as doing just enough research to be dangerous. Right. Like I know what I'm doing. I'm confident in the reliability of the facts that I'm using for the novel.

[12:20] But the research will often be much more, much more hands-on. Like I'll go and I test drove some self driving cars, or cars at least that have a self driving function when you're on the highway and just sat there and, and kind of experienced what that felt like.

[12:36] I interviewed a number of people who were in the AI community,

[12:39] researchers, attorneys and so on. 

[12:43] I did a lot of listening and reading, you know, to podcasts and to,

[12:47] essays and position papers but it wasn't overwhelming at all. That's one thing I've learned as I've gone along. My first two novels were historical novels and 

[12:58] I've become less,

[13:00] I don't know, I don't like the research to bog down the narrative.

[13:03] And I also often worry if I do too much research and feel like I can't start writing until I've done all my research that can really detract from the immediacy of the narrative.

[13:13] Cindy: Well, that's true. And also at some point you just probably have learned everything you need to know and after that it's just extra stuff that's interesting but not so helpful.

[13:21] Bruce: Exactly. And then I might look up stuff as I go along as needed.

[13:25] Cindy: So what was it like in a self-driving car? I haven't really done any of that.

[13:29] Bruce: Well, you, you may have done it if you like, if you know, those lane departure alerts.

[13:34] Cindy: That's true, I guess.

[13:35] Bruce: You know, and that's, I wouldn't call that AI but it is a kind of, you know, machine learning type thing. And now you can just go to your local, a number of car dealers like a Tesla or there's several other big luxury cars that have this mode now.

[13:52] And it's really odd, you know, you're sitting there. I think probably the better way to describe it is if you've ever been in a Waymo out in San Francisco.

[14:01] These are self driving taxis you can just summon with an app.

[14:04] And that is really weird when you're sitting in the back seat or the front seat and you're just getting driven along by essentially a robot, an AI.

[14:12] And that's,

[14:15] you said this is one of the first novels written entirely in the age of AI but of course, any novel about the contemporary world is being written in the age of AI and 

[14:24] it's all there around us. And I really wanted this not to be futuristic. You know, this is not,

[14:30] it's not like one novel I really loved lately was Annie Bot, which was about a,

[14:37] a companion AI robot. But that is definitely in the future, not right now,

[14:43] or at least not to that extent. And I really wanted this to be very much of the moment.

[14:49] Cindy: Yes. And I agree with you that AI is all around us, but I feel like when I'm reading most novels it's not constantly an issue that's in my head as it was when I was reading your book, you know.

[14:59] Bruce: Exactly. Yeah.

[15:00] Cindy: And so it was really making me think a lot more. I think there is so much chatter about AI and authors using it and a variety of issues that are coming up.

[15:08] I have not been to San Francisco since the Waymo cars are there, but when I was in Las Vegas in December.

[15:13] Bruce: Yes, that's another place. Yeah.

[15:15] Cindy: Yes. They're building this huge underground tunnel where they're going to be bringing cars in that are self driving. And they were all talking about it and I thought, wow, I just had no idea.

[15:24] Bruce: Yeah. And it's one of the dilemmas that researchers are wrestling with, you know, because it's every. And this is one of the points that that one of the characters makes in the book is that, if an accident happens involving a self driving car,

[15:38] everybody freaks out. And like, oh, do we really want these things? But if a horrible accident involving a tractor trailer happens, it's not national news.

[15:47] People don't say, gosh, maybe we shouldn't have tractor trailers. And it's a matter of what the world is getting used to. And I don't take a position in the novel.

[15:54] A novel is not an op ed,

[15:56] but the great thing about the form of fiction is you get to explore moral quandaries from all these different kinds of angles.

[16:04] Cindy: And the concept of faults in the world of self-driving cars is a thorny one. And it was something I'd never thought about till I read your book. And then I've been thinking about it non stop.

[16:12] Bruce: Yeah.

[16:13] Yeah. I was obsessed with it for about a year while writing the book. And like looking at, you'd asked about research earlier and there's, there is a lot of research into this, this problem, like how should AI systems,

[16:28] autonomous systems, make moral decisions? And what do those look like? What are the terms of them? What are the technologies behind them? How do algorithms work in moral and immoral ways?

[16:40] So those are questions that, you know, with deep sophistication that I didn't have time hardly to scrape the surface because I really, again, I wanted the novel to be propulsive.

[16:51] I didn't want it to be too philosophical.

[16:53] Cindy: Right. And I understand that. How far away do you think we are from this type of technology,

[16:58] actually being on the road on a regular basis? Do you have any ideas after writing this novel and doing the research?

[17:04] Bruce: We're already there.

[17:05] Cindy: But I mean regularly, like if we're out and about, how often do you think it will be a car driving versus me driving?

[17:12] Bruce: Oh, I have no idea, actually. I mean, I'm not an expert in any of this. I would imagine that we're. But from what I've read, from what the way that the experts are predicting, I would bet we'll see an awful lot more self driving cars increasing by,

[17:26] you know, more and more percentages in the next five to 10 years.

[17:30] Cindy: I was just curious, as you were doing your research, if you had a sense from people like they're saying this is still 15 years off, this is three years off, or, you know, who knows?

[17:39] But where they're projecting.

[17:41] Bruce: Right. Well, again, there's many thousands of them on the roads now.

[17:45] So it's, I, I'm sure it'll be fits and starts. I'm sure there'll be some awful accident that sets things back a few years,

[17:52] but it's coming. And if you look at what's going on in that industry in China, I think it's a really big part of things now.

[17:58] Cindy: Okay, that's interesting.

[18:00] Bruce: Yeah.

[18:00] Cindy: Well, you touched on this earlier, but one thing that really struck me as I was reading was how much each member of the family felt they were responsible for what happened.

[18:09] Did it take you a while to kind of figure that out, how each person was gonna feel and what was gonna cause them to feel that? I really liked that part of it.

[18:18] It had me thinking.

[18:19] Bruce: Well, initially I,

[18:21] it's no spoiler, but you know, we learn that Charlie is in the car at the wheel and Noah is sitting right next to him on his laptop and Noah's trying to finish a memo for work.

[18:33] even though Charlie's only 17 years old. So Noah is like the responsible adult in the car. And he's the one who should, especially in a family of five legally, he's the one who's like, responsible and he's not paying attention.

[18:46] And so initially I started with him,

[18:48] and then something is going on with Charlie, and I won't say what it is. But then, as I started building that story, I just thought, God, it would be really interesting if I broaden this web a little bit.

[19:00] And it actually wasn't until then that I came up with the idea of Lorelei as an expert in the field of AI and then once I had that, I was like, okay, now I kind of understand where this is going.

[19:13] And then I just had to build everybody's story.

[19:16] Even though, some of the stories you don't see at all, except from somebody else's point of view.

[19:21] You know, especially the youngest daughter and youngest child in the family, Izzy. And you know, 

[19:29] getting her sense of culpability was in some ways the hardest part. And then, it just all kind of, I remember the moment when I finally saw the whole thing, and it was a little like seeing a star, a five pointed star,

[19:43] like one of Lorelei's diagrams. Like, ah,

[19:45] that's it. Everybody feels a sense of responsibility.

[19:49] Cindy: What was really interesting for me, though, was the juxtaposition between the AI and the technology and humans. So even no matter how far along you are, technology wise, and what's happening, there's always a human element.

[20:01] And so that was happening throughout the story,

[20:04] and you had some great twists and turns, which of course I will not ruin, but humans are humans and they were doing what they do.

[20:11] Bruce: Yeah. And that, you know, that collision between the human and the machine, between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, if that's the right word for it. That's one of the big dilemmas in the novel is 

[20:22] How do we think about the agency of machines? How do we think about the morality of the machine?

[20:27] And how do we think of ourselves as machines in some ways? Are we algorithms? You know that in the prologue, Noah is having this thought. He's remembering something that Lorelei once said,

[20:38] which was a family is like an algorithm. And that becomes this kind of spooky prologue to the whole novel, like, how do we understand the ways that a family functions and relation to the way that.

[20:52] That a big computer algorithm functions?

[20:55] Cindy: Absolutely. And as a parent myself, and you mentioned that you're a parent.

[20:59] Some of what's happening with Noah, kind of makes you paranoid because I'm thinking he is the responsible adult. He was up front. But, you know, you're responsible for your children and that can be difficult sometimes.

[21:10] Bruce: Yeah. Especially if something is,

[21:12] we're all, you know, sitting next to our kids if they're driving, you know, I get on my phone, I don't pretend that I don't do that. Even when they were younger drivers,

[21:20] you know, it's those everyday kinds of mistakes that people can make

[21:27] that can cause an accident, a catastrophe, a tragedy.

[21:30] Cindy: The things you don't think about in the moment that are just everyday things that you will always look back on and think, if I just hadn't been on my phone or if I hadn't been reading this document or whatever it is.

[21:39] Bruce: Exactly. Yeah. We all live in that. What do you call it? The subjunctive. Right. Like if only I had not done that, then something else would have happened.

[21:47] These kind of conditionals. And Noah's thought all the way through the novel is like, if only, if only, if only. And I think that's one of the aspects of his character is this regret.

[21:57] Right. That, God, if I'd just been a little smarter. If I'd just been a little more on the ball, a little more attentive. And we all have moments like that.

[22:05] Cindy: Absolutely. Well, what surprised you the most when you were writing this one?

[22:10] Bruce: That's a great question. I need to think about that.

[22:12] I suppose it was an element of the research, learning that everybody who works in artificial intelligence in that field. And this explains a little bit of how I drew Lorelei's character.

[22:26] She's kind of a catastrophist, a catastrophizer.

[22:29] Everybody in the field has a P Doom number. Have you ever heard of that?

[22:33] Cindy: No.

[22:34] Bruce: P Doom. It's the chance like 1 out of 10. Some people do it on a 10 point scale, some do it on a hundred point scale, that artificial intelligence will wipe out the human species.

[22:45] So some people have a pretty high P doom number. I was surprised to learn.

[22:49] Like some people think, well, mine's 25.

[22:52] That's kind of scary. Like, you know, there's a 25% chance that AI will kill us all.

[22:58] And then other people, like I'm only two or three, which is still pretty scary.

[23:02] Cindy: Yeah. Cheery topic.

[23:03] Bruce: Cheery topic. At the end of the novel, I'm probably like a.

[23:07] Four something like that. I think Global warming is much more alarming. But of course, AI is contributing to global warming, contributing to climate change. The vast compute power that these companies now are using and

[23:18] The amount of resources that go into that, it's terrifying.

[23:21] Cindy: Yes. Well, that's interesting. Now I'm going to have to look up more about PDOOM numbers.

[23:25] Bruce: Yeah.

[23:26] Cindy: Tell me about the title and the cover. I just think this cover is fantastic. I mean, so representative of the book.

[23:33] Bruce: Yeah. Isn't it gorgeous? Yes. So I, you know, covers. I had nothing to do with the cover as I rarely do. There's been a couple covers in my career where I've pushed back on 

[23:43] The first offering from the editors, because often they'll tell, you probably know this talking to other authors. They'll send you the cover and they say, here's what we've come up with for the jacket design.

[23:53] Our sales team, our marketing people, publicity, we all love it, and we're excited to hear how much you love it, too.

[23:59] Um, so. So when you get the cover you're really bracing yourself because those fights can be kind of nasty. In this case, I open the attachment on my phone and I just gasp because it felt like this person was reading my mind.

[24:15] And it just really felt like it's right there. It's this beautiful image of some family members on a. On a bay or an inlet. There's somebody out kayaking in the water.

[24:26] There's somebody sitting on the deck. There's some blankets and things. Like. It's a very naturalistic image. I think it's probably a stock photograph. But then the designer smeared the people and the human elements into this multicolored kind of rainbow kind of glitched vision.

[24:45] And it's just absolutely beautiful. It's exactly how I pictured it. Like this suspenseful family drama that is where things are not what they seem,

[24:54] but Again, without being futuristic. Because this is not a futuristic novel. It's not dystopian. It's right now.

[25:00] Cindy: No, I agree. I just think it is stellar. One of my favorite covers this year. And then I love the way they've done Culpability, too, where it starts, you know, going vertically and then it's horizontal.

[25:09] And tell me about how you came up with Culpability as a title.

[25:12] Bruce: Well, it's. It perfectly summarizes t

[25:16] The theme of the book, which is about responsibility and, like, who's guilty,

[25:22] Who's guilty for what?

[25:24] And can a machine, an unthinking, unsensing machine, be culpable, be guilty?

[25:32] How do we think of that? love just the one word title in this one. All my other novels have multiple words. This one, I think, just kind of rang for me.

[25:43] We thought about changing it with my editor, but we ended up with it just kind of hitting the right note.

[25:50] Cindy: Well, before we wrap up, Bruce, what have you read recently that you really liked?

[25:53] Bruce: Well, in the last couple of years, I've read some books that I have just devoured.

[25:58] Novels I tend to read.

[26:01] I'm often reading three novels at the same time. I'm listening to one as I walk. I'm reading one on my Kindle and then I'm reading one in hard copy that I leave in the living room for when I'm taking a reading break in the middle of my writing day.

[26:14] So I'm.

[26:15] And I don't know how I managed to keep my attention on three different narratives at the same time, but that's often what I'm doing. But a few novels that I've really loved lately.

[26:25] Eric Puchner, Dream State. I don't know if you read that. Set in Montana. It's a novel of multiple generations.

[26:33] It's a climate novel as well. A climate theme novel.

[26:37] Absolutely beautiful.

[26:39] Cindy: I've heard great things about Dream State. I have not gotten to it yet, but I always love stories that are at least partially centered around climate. And I didn't realize that about that one, so I'll definitely bump it up my list.

[26:49] Bruce: Well, you don't expect that when you start, you know, unless you've read a summary of it or a review. Because that's not really what the novel is about.

[26:57] It's just the sensibility.

[26:59] Cindy: Got it.

[26:59] Bruce: So that's what makes it really interesting.

[27:01] Cindy: Okay, good.

[27:02] Bruce: Tony Tulathimutte’s novel Rejection. I really love just a series of linked stories. I guess you wouldn't. It's kind of a novel in stories,

[27:11] I think is how it was imagined. And oh, it's so dark, but so brutal and honest and real.

[27:17] Have you read that? Have you had a chance to read that yet?

[27:19] Cindy: I haven't. And I am a very visual person. So off the top of my head, that's not ringing a bell. But I'm sure if I see the cover I'll be like, oh, yes, I do know that one.

[27:27] But no, I'm gonna have to look it up.

[27:28] Bruce: Yeah, really wonderful. And then Hernan Diaz’s Trust, which won the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago. And I recently reread it and just,

[27:36] I admire it so much for the ways that he,

[27:39] breaks it into several different parts. One part is an actual novel, you know, a novel within a novel. Then there's a different kind of narrative, a kind of memoir.

[27:48] Ish part. And it's just, I think, brilliantly conceived. And what I admire most about that novel, aside from the voice, is just the structure of it, which is gorgeous.

[27:56] And then Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, which I think was last year, my favorite novel of last year. One of my favorite novels.

[28:04] And then where, you know, where else to begin. I judged the PEN Faulkner Prize this year, and there were some novels on that list that were just staggering. I think my favorite novel in the last few years, my favorite of all is Garth Greenwell, Small Rain.

[28:16] Just gorgeous.

[28:17] Cindy: Okay, perfect. I'm not familiar with that one. Trust has been on my list forever, and one of my book clubs here is reading it at the end of June. We're discussing it.

[28:25] So it's up very soon for me, and I can't wait to read it. I've heard great things. Yeah.

[28:28] Bruce: Oh, yeah. It's really wonderful. Good.

[28:30] Cindy: I don't know if you've seen Maybe Happy Ending, which just won the Tony for best musical and best book, and then the main actor won for best actor in a musical.

[28:38] It's about two robots that it's set a little bit in the future in South Korea, but it also made me think a little bit about your book because it's these two robots that have been consigned to the kind of trash heap, but they live in this apartment building.

[28:51] And it really is a lot about AI as well. It was really well done and made me think about your book when I was reading your book.

[28:58] Bruce: Ooh, that sounds wonderful. I'll try to catch that next time I'm up in the city.

[29:00] Cindy: Yeah, it's so, so well done. So well. Thank you so much, Bruce. I really appreciate your time. It was wonderful to get to chat about Culpability.

[29:08] Bruce: Thank you. It was an absolute pleasure.

[29:13] Cindy: Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. I would love to connect with you on Instagram or Facebook where you can find me at @thoughtsfromapage. If you enjoy the show and have a moment to rate it or subscribe to it, wherever you listen to your podcasts, I would really appreciate it.

[29:27] It makes a huge difference. And please tell all of your friends about Thoughts from a Page. Word of mouth does wonders to help the show grow.

[29:34] The book discussed in this episode can be purchased at my bookshop storefront and the link is in the show notes. I hope you'll tune in next time.